3 Detours to Avoid in Retail's Race to Win With Big Data

When it comes down to it, words are data, and we should think of them that way. By adopting tools that gather search terms and make correlations between the words a shopper writes and what they ultimately buy, retailers can personalize the shopping experience without having to really understand what the searcher "meant." For example, data-crunching machines don't understand the meaning behind "red stainless steel gas BBQ." But because they track word data, clicks and purchases, the machine knows which products or content are related to the terms and can populate the shopper's screen with a grill that has the appropriate specs without understanding the words at all.